Petty's novella wastes no time, as we learn immediately of the dark past of the main character. Left to his thoughts, "Bulldog Barker" recounts the incidents that still haunt him, that have brought him to his current state, stuck inside this dreary jail cell.

Enter the idyllic small town life of 1963. A rag-tag brood of friends, all with their own nicknames and idiosyncracies, continue lives of relative peace. They crack their jokes and make their claims, and all the while the day-to-day freedom of childhood beckons at every turn.
But something ominous looms around those turns, and Petty exposes the fragility of human life in ways that leave us stopped in our tracks. The first-person perspective plants us right in the neighborhoods and at the dance and the barber shop and on quiet streets where people live and love in normal fashion. But it also functions to allow us to feel the fear; to experience the impending darkness that approaches these peaceful lives.

For Jared is coming, and when he arrives, he changes the lives of Barker and his tightly-knit friends forever. What happens next is visceral and palpable. For reader and character, the destruction of a madman brings irrevocable change. It is a welcoming to a time and a place, a vision of hell.

Welcome to Jared's Little Playground.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ViHFj-pSA&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dqYqWqFyNk&feature=relmfu ( )

Petty's novella wastes no time, as we learn immediately of the dark past of the main character. Left to his thoughts, "Bulldog Barker" recounts the incidents that still haunt him, that have brought him to his current state, stuck inside this dreary jail cell.

Enter the idyllic small town life of 1963. A rag-tag brood of friends, all with their own nicknames and idiosyncracies, continue lives of relative peace. They crack their jokes and make their claims, and all the while the day-to-day freedom of childhood beckons at every turn.
But something ominous looms around those turns, and Petty exposes the fragility of human life in ways that leave us stopped in our tracks. The first-person perspective plants us right in the neighborhoods and at the dance and the barber shop and on quiet streets where people live and love in normal fashion. But it also functions to allow us to feel the fear; to experience the impending darkness that approaches these peaceful lives.

For Jared is coming, and when he arrives, he changes the lives of Barker and his tightly-knit friends forever. What happens next is visceral and palpable. For reader and character, the destruction of a madman brings irrevocable change. It is a welcoming to a time and a place, a vision of hell.

Welcome to Jared's Little Playground.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ViHFj-pSA&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dqYqWqFyNk&feature=relmfu ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?ID=637 ( )